“PURELY OPTICAL EXPERIENCE AGAINST OPTICAL EXPERIENCE AS REVISED OR MODIFIED BY TACTILE ASSOCIATIONS”
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“All recognizable entities (including pictures themselves) exist in three-dimensional space, and the barest suggestion of a recognizable entity suffices to call up associations of that kind of space. The fragmentary silhouette of a human figure, or of a teacup, will do so, and by doing so alienate pictorial space from the literal two-dimensionality which is the guarantee of painting’s independence as an art. For, as has already been said, three-dimensionality is the province of sculpture. To acheive autonomy, painting has had above all to divest itself of everything it might share with sculpture, and it is in its effort to do this, and not so much—i repeat—to exclude the representational or literary, that painting has made itself abstract.”
-Clement Greenberg “Modernist Painting” (1960)
Guys, there’s relevancy here.
Tomma Abts I don’t know if I would call it a ‘goal’ to make something unseen, but maybe an incentive – not knowing what the outcome might be is what makes me want to start another painting. I have no plans, sketches or preconceptions when I begin, it is just decision after decision – an ongoing process of putting something onto the canvas and then editing it, then putting something down and editing it again – and in that way slowly constructing something. I don’t think that ‘unseen’ equals ‘abstract’; I think unseen has to do with the openness of the process. The making itself leads the way. The image is the manifestation of the process.
I am not sure what the term abstraction means at this point. I have certainly never made a decision to be an abstract painter in the sense of having a concept I have to adhere to. I just think it gives me a lot of freedom not to have to work around representational issues, meaning that nothing is a given.
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Tauba Auerbach … The word ‘spiritual’ is not only unfashionable, it’s contaminated by a host of unsavoury associations, but worst of all it’s just too dang general. And when something is hard to describe, like the ‘thing’ we’re talking about, it’s a mistake to assume that it lacks specificity.
For me, this part of my thinking could best be described as running parallel to the spiritual, but contiguous with the physical and the rational. It’s not a cerebral operation, but it’s not at odds with the cerebral either. They support one another. It’s the part of you that can know something to be true without knowing why. It’s like a sense of equilibrium; even with your eyes closed, you can sense that you are straight up and down.
on “intuitive” art-making.
The map–territory relation describes the relationship between an object and a representation of that object, as in the relation between a geographical territory and a map of it. Polish-American scientist and philosopherAlfred Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory,” encapsulating his view that an abstraction derived from something, or a reaction to it, is not the thing itself. Korzybski held that many people do confuse maps with territories, i.e. confuse models of reality with reality itself.
